Kohlberg Kravis Roberts

Co-founded KKR in 1976 and serves as Co-Executive Chairman, having previously been Co-CEO until 2021. He remains active in managing the firm and sits on each regional Private Equity Investment Committee, and serves on the boards of Axel Springer and Catalio Capital Management.

Mentor and co-founder of KKR alongside Henry Kravis and George Roberts; helped launch the firm in 1976 and played a foundational role in establishing the alternatives investment industry.

Jack Hughes serves on Riphean Investments' Advisory Board and is Principal Consultant of Altus Associates, bringing 25 years of government contracting M&A experience. He previously held CFO roles at Alion Science and Technology and BTG, and was a senior executive at ManTech International.

Managing Director of Finance responsible for accounting and financial reporting across the firm and its funds. Previously a VP at Fortress Investment Group and a Senior Associate at TPG, with earlier experience at Ernst & Young.

Philipp Freise is Co-Head of European Private Equity at KKR, where he has worked for twenty-five years building the firm's German business and participating in major transactions including Demag, DSD, IFM, MTU Aero Engines, and OHB. Since 2005, he has led KKR's Technology, Media and Telecom vertical across EMEA, overseeing investments in companies such as Axel Springer SE, BMG Rights Management, Fotolia, GetYourGuide, GfK SE, Mediawan Leonine, Scout24 Switzerland, Trainline, and FGS Global, and helped establish the firm's Next Generation Technology Growth Equity team in Europe. Freise previously worked as a startup entrepreneur and serves as Chairman designate of the Board of Trustees for the Friends of the Richard Wagner opera festival in Bayreuth, as well as Chair of the Development Committee and Trustee of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden Foundation in London.

Senior Associate responsible for client services, investor inquiries, and fundraising operations support. Previously a VP on the Client and Capital Formation team at TPG, with earlier experience at BNY Mellon.

Evan Spiegel co-founded Snapchat at Stanford in 2011 and turned down a reported $3B acquisition offer from Facebook in 2013, a decision vindicated by Snap's 2017 IPO. He has been CEO throughout, defending the company through Instagram's direct cloning of Stories and pivoting Snap toward augmented reality hardware with Spectacles. He remains one of the youngest people ever to lead a company to a multi-billion-dollar public listing.

Antoine Blondeau, a 25-year AI veteran who helped build Siri's core technologies, brings hands-on large-scale AI experience; he backed OpenAI, InstaDeep (acq. BioNTech), and sits on Crypto.com's board exploring blockchain–AI.

Clare Gilmartin is an Advisor at Active Partners, where she supports the early-stage team in evaluating investments and advising portfolio companies. She began her career at Unilever and Boston Consulting Group before spending over ten years at eBay in strategy and operations roles, including responsibility for the UK and Greater Europe. In 2013 she became CEO of Trainline, leading its international expansion and its 2019 IPO on the LSE Main Market. She studied at University College Dublin.

Matthew Ball is CEO at Epyllion. He previously published blog content under the name Liam Boluk and has held the position of Chief Strategy Officer at Xbox.

Assistant Controller handling accounting and financial reporting for the firm and its funds. A licensed CPA who previously spent nearly a decade in KPMG's Dallas asset management practice.

Philipp Pausder is the founder of thermondo, a German company offering residential heat pump retrofits along with PV and battery systems, home energy management, power tariffs, and financing solutions, employing over 1,000 people and having completed close to 50,000 heating system retrofits. He serves as Senior Advisor to KKR's Global Climate Fund and previously founded Clean Venture, an M&A boutique advising large and mid-cap companies on distributed energy transactions across four continents. He is also an angel investor and board member.

Matthew R. “Matt” Cohler is a technology operator, venture investor and public-company director whose career connects the early LinkedIn and Facebook networks to Benchmark's consumer, marketplace and software portfolio. Born in 1977 according to secondary biographies, he graduated from Yale in 2001 with a B.A. in music, cum laude and with distinction, after an early period working at AsiaInfo in Beijing; he then consulted in McKinsey's Silicon Valley office. Reid Hoffman recruited him to LinkedIn's founding team in 2003, where he served as vice president and general manager, and Peter Thiel introduced him to Facebook in early 2005. Facebook and issuer records variously call him one of the first five hires or employee No. 7; both describe him as the first outside executive hire. As vice president of product management he helped guide product, strategy and organizational growth through the network's expansion, then remained a special adviser after leaving in June 2008. At 31 he joined Benchmark's equal partnership. Directly documented Cohler-led or boarded investments include Asana, Quora, Instagram, ResearchGate, Peixe Urbano, Couchsurfing, Domo, 1stDibs, Edmodo, Xapo, Duo Security, Tinder, Greenhouse and DeepL; Axios also directly attributes Dropbox to him. Instagram, Asana, Domo, 1stDibs, Duo and Edmodo produced acquisitions or public listings, while Peixe Urbano later collapsed and Couchsurfing's conversion from nonprofit to venture-backed benefit corporation generated community criticism. Benchmark-wide relationships with Uber, Twitter, Zendesk, Snapchat and HackerOne are separated from sole deal leadership. His stated method is bottom-up and founder-first: identify extraordinary people, clarity of purpose, products users love organically, a narrow wedge capable of reshaping a market, and genuine network or marketplace liquidity. He stepped out of new Benchmark funds in 2018 but retained legacy-board and fund interests. He served on Uber's board from the 2017 governance crisis through July 2019, resigning without disagreement; he left Asana's board in June 2026 in an orderly refresh. Current filing-confirmed boards are KKR and 1stDibs, where he is lead independent director. Public service includes vice-chair roles at Environmental Defense Fund and the San Francisco Symphony and investment-committee service for Yale and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Company announcements identify later personal angel investments in PortalOne and Enode; their vehicles and amounts are undisclosed. No complete personal or Benchmark return record is public.